Archival Sound Recordings offers selections of music, spoken word and environmental sounds from the British Library Sound Archive available online to UK Higher and Further Education. There are currently over 4000 hours of recordings, with more being added over the coming year. Highlights include in-depth oral history interviews, pre-1957 classical music recordings, ethnomusicological field recordings, accents and dialects, whildlife sounds, radio programmes, public debates, and early recordings originally captured on wax cylinders.
Please note that this is not a JISC Collections agreement - licensing is direct via the British Library.
Content description
Archival Sound Recordings offers selections of music, spoken word and environmental sounds from the British Library Sound Archive available online to UK Higher and Further Education. There are currently over 4000 hours of recordings, with more being added over the coming year. Highlights include in-depth oral history interviews, pre-1957 classical music recordings, ethnomusicological field recordings, accents and dialects, whildlife sounds, radio programmes, public debates, and early recordings originally captured on wax cylinders. Archival Sound Recordings offers a broad range of cross-disciplinary, primary source material for researchers. For teachers it provides engaging, thought-provoking material for lessons and a tool for teaching key skills to students of all levels. To search and browse recordings, visit http://sounds.bl.uk. You can read more about the project at http://sounds.bl.uk/TextPage.aspx?page=about.
Main subject areas
Archival Sound Recordings is a multi-disciplinary resource, covering English, history, music, art & design, media, linguistics, social sciences, political studies, ethnomusicology, zoology and history of science.
Academic level
Higher and Further education.
Date range
From wax cylinders, recorded in 1898, to the present day.
Updates
New content will be added throughout 2008 and the first part of 2009.
Testimonials, Case Studies or User Reviews
"Archival Sound Recordings creates the potential for new fields of cross-disciplinary research. It has immense value in bringing our history to life for future generations."
- Prof. Celia Duffy, Head of Research, National Centre for Research in the Performing Arts.
"The Oral History of Jazz covers not only the production and consumption of the music itself, but the wider social history of ethnicity, popular culture and the relationship of the UK with the US. It is an invaluable resource and teaching aid for tutors and students."
- Dr Paul Long, Senior Lecturer in Media Theory, Birmingham University.
"I found the Art and Design interviews fantastic to work with. It gave students a different viewpoint to written texts, and the realism of it inspired them to source other material beyond Google searches."
- Amanda Broadley, Art and Photography Tutor, Joseph Priestley College.
"The recordings are extremely useful. In Bunyoro Kingdom of Uganda, for example, they have instruments that are not played because nobody remembers the skills or the music. The music can be restored using the recordings held on Archival Sound Recordings."
- Samuel Kahunde, PhD ethnomusicology student, Sheffield University.
Additional content
Subject to copyright, future collections to be uploaded by 2009: Oral History of the Jewish Community, Classical Composers, Decca West Africa Recordings, Michael Gerzon Contemporary Music Recordings, Early Spoken Word, Traditional Music in England, British Ethnomusicologists, ICA Talks from 1980s.
Publisher's selection policy
Consultation with the User Community through the ASR User Panel and online community. Risk assessment prior to content proposal. Risks assessed: Research intereste, technical issues related to digitisation, likelihood of clearing IP, levels of documentation or availability of contextual data.
Other institutions subscribing
Over two thirds of UK Higher Education institutions and more than 100 FE colleges have already signed up for this service.
Subscription
To request a licence, library staff should email asr@bl.uk
The British Library will then send two copies for the licence to be signed and returned by the institution.
ASR is available for free to UK HE and FE institutions.
Functionality and standards compliance
Full text linking
n/a
Federated searching
n/a
MARC records
n/a
Metadata standards
The ASR project has developed a METS profile and schema that includes extension scheme compliant with DC Terms (based on the British Library Application Profile to support resource discovery), MODS (to support long-term preservation) and ID-3 for tagging audio files delivered online.
Search options
Basic search only.
Post-search options
n/a
Usage statistics
n/a
Authentication
Federated access management via the UK Access Management Federation. Natively Shibboleth.
Personalisation of the online resource
The second phase project is developing functionality to allow users to add tags and comments.
Accessibility
ASR is not currently compliant with the double A rating in accordance with W3C WAI guidelines but has been tested by people with various disabilities.
Library support information